Coaxial cable television systems have been in widespread use for many years and extensive networks have been developed. The extensive and complex networks are often difficult for a cable operator to manage and monitor. Particularly, a typical cable network generally contains a headend which provides content to a cable modem termination system (CMTS) containing several receivers, each receiver is usually connected to modems of many subscribers, e.g., a single receiver may be connected to hundreds of modems. In many instances the operator will cable multiple receivers together to serve a particular area of a town or city.
Cable operators often use Load Balancing Groups to equalize the load of the traffic across receivers, and Spectrum Groups to allocate multiple upstream frequencies to a receiver. In order to have receivers belong to the same Load Balancing Group or Spectrum Group they must be physically connected together. Multiple frequencies in a Spectrum Group may be used for frequency agility whenever the CMTS detects that the frequency a receiver is currently using has communication problems, such as having high noise levels. The CMTS can determine which “backup” frequency is the best to use and retune the receiver in the Spectrum Group to the new frequency with no interruption to cable subscribers.
In order for cable operators to take advantage of the Load Balancing and Spectrum Group features they have to first manually configure every Load Balancing Group and Spectrum Group. For example, the Motorola BSR 64000 has 12 slots available for CMTS cards with 8 receivers on each card. The worse case scenario, but a common one, would be that the operator has to configure 48 Load Balancing Groups, with two upstreams per Load Balancing Group and/or 96 Spectrum Groups. These are time consuming efforts that can also be prone to errors for the cable operator. In some instances cable operators may not want to take advantage of these features because they do want to expend the resources to perform the manual configuration.
When cable operators do expend the resources to perform the manual configuration to setup Load Balancing and Spectrum Groups they typically need to do a lot of configuration to get it to run correctly. The Load Balancing Groups have to be logically configured exactly as they are physically wired. This process is can be error prone due to a mis-wiring or data entry error. Even if the CMTS was wired correctly there may still be bad connections or damaged cables.
Currently there is no existing way for the CMTS, to detect if a coaxial cable is loose, damaged or removed from the CMTS receiver. Today, for example, if someone removes the coaxial cable from a receiver port there is no way for the CMTS to detect that cable has been disconnected or broken, especially if the cable is broken a distance away from the CMTS receiver card input. Since many cable operators also wire multiple CMTS receivers together to act as a single Spectrum Group to support certain areas of a town/city, there can be numerous Spectrum Groups and wiring configurations which could lead to cabling mistakes. To make matters worse, internally the cable operator is likely to believe that a disconnected cable is still connected, resulting in incorrect data being provided to various monitoring systems, such as software algorithms for Load Balancing. Cable technicians often have difficulty determining if a problem is a configuration problem, a hardware problem or a software problem.
Currently there is no automated method for cable operators to detect how their CMTS is physically wired with the head end. There is also no method to automatically configure their Load Balancing Groups. Detecting how the CMTS is physically wired could help reduce down time for cable subscribers because this could help in detecting possible bad connections or cables.